They denounce a “chaotic curriculum” and a “permanent improvisation”.
This Thursday, the students of the last promotion of the National School of Administration (ENA) are on strike.
In a column published on the Le Monde website, the students say they want to "warn about [their] training conditions and the weakening of the career public service".
In the wake of the diplomats, who went on strike on June 2, a first in twenty years, the students of the Germaine Tillon promotion, a great figure in the Resistance, point to a “succession of reforms” implemented in a “hasty and not concerted".
“Today it is the very attractiveness of the public service that is in danger”, assert these future senior officials of the ENA.
"The extinction of the prefectural corps and the diplomatic corps" and "the abolition of our school" were "orchestrated without sufficient visibility" and "deeply destabilized the officials concerned", they lament.
Created in 1945 by General de Gaulle, the ENA was abolished on January 1 to make way for the new National Institute of Public Service (INSP) wanted by Emmanuel Macron as part of a vast reform of the senior civil service.
As for the creation of the INSP, "it has so far resulted in a chaotic course", according to them, with "brutal changes in the content of the lessons (which) have given rise to permanent improvisation".
“Dysfunctions within the new INSP”
If they share "the desire to improve the training of civil servants" in the "service of public action closer to citizens", they deplore that "the dysfunctions within the new INSP jeopardize these objectives".
The students also point to "the uncertainty and opacity generated by the new exit tests, which are still not defined less than thirty days from their deadline" when they were supposed to "return to a classification decried for generations ".
These new tests “on the contrary reinforce the arbitrariness with which our promotion is confronted”, castigates the platform, adopted almost unanimously by the 82 students of the promotion.
Without calling into question "the end of direct access" of enarques fresh out of the great bodies of the State, they affirm that "certain positions offered on leaving the INSP do not correspond to senior management functions of the state”.
They are worried about “increased recourse to outsourcing” of State missions, echoing the debate on consulting firms.
"It's the INSP model which, after barely six months of existence, is dangerously called into question", conclude the students of the Germaine Tillon class.
By their "unprecedented mobilization", they demand "the respect of the commitments made towards [their] promotion and the definition, in consultation, of the meritocratic, open and transparent career conditions of future civil servants".
Questioned by AFP, the management of the INSP did not wish to react to this forum.